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Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar are the target of a new lawsuit that claims that the companies conspired "to fix and suppress the compensation of their employees."

The class action lawsuit (PDF), filed yesterday by former Lucasfilm software engineer Siddharth Hariharan, focuses around "no solicitation" agreements that the companies in question allegedly agreed to between 2005 and 2009. It claims that these tech companies violated California antitrust statutes, though interestingly enough it doesn't seek relief under the U.S. Clayton Act of 1914. That assures the case only deals with California law, rather than federal antitrust statutes.

If these accusations sound familiar, it's because Apple, Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar settled with the Department of Justice last year over an investigation into anticompetitive employee solicitation agreements. The lawsuit actually mentions the DoJ investigation as evidence of this wrongdoing. Some companies, including Google, announced that they would end their "no cold call" policies.

The class action details the various relationships and alleged agreements between these companies. Most of these we knew about from the DoJ investigation (the image above, taken from the lawsuit, details those relationships). However, this lawsuit details a "conspiracy" between Pixar and Lucasfilm "to eliminate competition between them for skilled labor," something that wasn't in the DoJ report. Pixar originated from a division of Lucasfilm that Apple CEO Steve Jobs purchased in 1986.

Essentially this lawsuit argues that that a lack of competition for Silicon Valley talent resulted in artificial wages that were lower than market value. If Google, Apple, Adobe and other tech companies hadn't agreed to "no cold call" policies that prevented employee poaching, then it stands to reason that wages would have been higher due to increased competition for talent.

"We estimate that because of reduced competition for their services, compensation for skilled employees at Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar was reduced by 10 to 15 percent," said Joseph Saveri, a representative of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, the law firm that filed the class action lawsuit on behalf of Hariharan.

For its part, Intel says that it will conduct a "vigorous defense," and Lucasfilm believes "the claim is meritless." Those are fighting words, which is why this case could become very interesting.

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